Policy for Campaigns 05: Conversations with your supporter base about policy

Who are your supporters, and how do you deal with them as part of your policy work?

Campaigning organisations mostly have a membership or supporter base of some sort. The relationship between this base and its policy work is a massive topic, on which there will no doubt be many future articles. This one is a bit of a scoping exercise to start things off, and will touch briefly on a number of themes that will need more thorough explanation later.

Who is your supporter base?

The first question about your supporter base must be: who are they? Answers to this will vary a lot, and for some organisations the answer might be surprisingly nebulous. For a trade association, the potential supporter base will be clearly defined as a particular type of business or organisation, while for a professional body it will be the professionals in question; for a charity, it might be people who have experienced a particular set of circumstances – homelessness, a particular type of crime, a particular illness, and so on – or people who are close to someone who has had that experience.

But for other campaigning organisations, their constituency is less clear. If they are campaigning on an issue that has impacts across the population, such as the environment or a very broad social issue such as civil liberties, or health in a general sense, they do not have a clearly defined supporter base. They may well have supporters, but they will be individuals who happen to take an interest in the issue and feel strongly about it (and for completeness, organisations with a supporter base defined by their experiences can also attract this broader category of supporters with a general interest). These supporters do not necessarily have a particular set of direct experiences in common. This can have big implications for how the organisation operates: its campaigns may not be able to draw on a ready pool of direct personal experience of the issue concerned, and the same may go for its policy work. It may be more prone than some other organisations to the stereotypical pattern of older, middle class supporters. And these supporters may not be so strongly motivated to take campaigning actions. However, plenty of organisations find ways to function effectively within these constraints, operating much more as pressure groups than grass roots campaigning bodies.

Either way, your supporter base might take several different forms. It could be a formal membership where the status of being a member is officially assigned to people, perhaps for a fee. Formal memberships, and particularly fee-paying ones, now appear increasingly old fashioned: for many organisations, their supporter base is their database, ie the people who they are in touch with and who want to be contacted by them. But it does depend: a trade association representing medium to large businesses might have a relatively small formal membership, in terms of absolute numbers, and will typically be funded by (potentially quite substantial) membership fees; these memberships of, say, a few hundred businesses can contrast starkly with charities, professional bodies or trade bodies for small businesses, whose membership lists might run into tens of thousands.

As well as the people you know, there are the people you don’t know. Not every individual or organisation affected by an issue will join the relevant campaigning organisation (perhaps unless membership is some sort of formal requirement, although the stricter such requirements are, the more cautious organisations tend to be about campaigning, given that some members have not joined by choice). This leaves a group of beneficiaries of your activities who do not play a part in supporting them. Conversely, a membership might contain the opposite group: people who take an interest in the matter, but would not themselves benefit from a positive policy change (such as relatives of someone with a particular illness, for example). When it comes to policy, and then to campaigning, this can create slightly thorny questions about who you are actually representing, and can claim to be campaigning for: all the people affected, even if many of them have nothing to do with you? Your members or supporters, even if some of them are not directly affected, or if they are a sub-set of everyone affected by your issue? All of those?

Each organisation will have its own set of answers to those questions, and a supporter base whose composition they (hopefully) understand in relation to the wider make-up of the groups who might benefit from their success in achieving change (if they’re not identical). So let’s consider the role that a supporter base – the people the organisation is in some way in touch with – might have in policy work.

Supporter involvement

Possible approaches to involving supporters in policy work provide a massive topic on their own. Indeed, some would challenge the implicit divide between the campaigning organisation (with, often, paid professional staff) and its supporters: they argue the two groups should be the same. The situation of able-bodied paid staff running campaigns to achieve change to benefit disabled people, for instance, is strongly distasteful to some disabled campaigners (discussed in this recent Policy Pulse). For our purposes, we’ll continue to assume there is a divide of some sort, with an organisation on the one hand and supporters and beneficiaries on the other; this doesn’t necessarily preclude the staff or volunteers at the organisation being drawn from the supporter base.

That being the case, it may be that the supporter base will be supplying a chunk of your evidence. If you need to understand a particular aspect of the policy problem you’re working on, they may be your first port of call. This might involve asking for ad hoc input, or maybe asking for more structured information via surveys, interviews, focus groups and so on. This brings us back to some of the considerations around evidence explored in this recent article. Further down the line, the same supporters may get asked to take campaigning actions, to push for the policy change you have advocated.

Your supporters may have more extensive and formal roles than just supplying evidence. Your organisation may have processes for involving supporters closely in the work it does, with steering groups, consultative panels and so on, or ways for supporters to review and feed back on policy as it is developed. This is in many ways highly desirable: the most effective policy will always be made in close collaboration with the people affected, and the risk of error is always greatest when they do not have input.

But it’s not an easy thing to achieve: by definition you’re looking for people’s first hand experiences, but they don’t necessarily come with knowledge of policy structures and processes built in. There are risks of creating false expectations of speedy change (in turn leading to later fall-outs if these are dashed by reality), of policy being distorted to appease supporters who are vociferous but not well placed to judge what will be effective, or of simply wasting people’s time if their input does not translate into the policy eventually developed. The process can also be a bit chicken and egg: the most effective input might be gained by directing discussions and work at a particular aspect of a problem; but you might be making assumptions (or educated guesses) about priority areas for exploration in order to have those conversations. A flip-side of this is where these groups or panels focus on brass tacks aspects of their experience, which matter a great deal but are already well documented and understood, so you’re not actually gaining any insight you didn’t already have.

There may also be practical issues to think about in terms of working with your supporters. If the organisation works with prisoners, for instance, that throws up some obvious practical barriers to contact or communication. But there may be other groups who are time poor as a direct result of the issues you are working on, such as unpaid carers. Equally, will providing input to your policy work always be a priority within a small business? After all, it is not revenue-earning work. At the other end of the scale, if your supporters or members are large corporates, which parts of the organisation will you be dealing with? This might vary from topic to topic, but you might also need to consider whether different departments or functions in these businesses might have different ways of looking at the same issue.

Governance

Perhaps a more traditional route for supporter input is through governance processes. Many campaigning organisations will draw their non-executive boards (of directors, or trustees) from the ranks of their beneficiaries and supporters (subject to the caveat above about organisations without obviously defined constituencies). There may be further tiers of governance: sub-committees of the top-level board, consultative bodies that sit below or outside the board, and so on. To what extent do you want your policy work to be overseen by these formal governance arrangements?

The answer will be subtly different for every organisation, but there are some fairly universal trade-offs. Keeping policy outside those governance structures gives you a lot of freedom, but if you mess something up you’re entirely on the hook for it (that is, assuming that governance and line management structures are sufficiently capable to hold you to account). On the other hand, working with the governance structures ensures your work dovetails with the wider direction of the organisation, and also ensures at least some sharing of responsibility if things go wrong. But it does depend on the governance bodies being capable: even with highly capable groups, you will need to provide briefing and background to ensure they understand what you’re doing, and what you’re asking them for, and why; with less capable groups, who struggle to understand your work or provide useful input, there might be a need for heavy upward management just to ensure their oversight doesn’t amount to unhelpful interference. If you have the opportunity to set up or influence arrangements for policy in the governance of your organisation, these are things to consider.

Communications

You will need to consider how to communicate with supporters and provide them with information. Do they even know, or care, what policy is? On one level clearly they do, as they have in some way become involved with an organisation that is trying to achieve policy change. But they won’t necessarily articulate it in those terms: supporters from professional backgrounds may be fine with it, but talk of “policy” can seem overly formal or officious, or even intimidating to others. As ever in communication, selecting appropriate language for your audience matters a great deal, and talking in terms of “what we believe / say / want to see” may often be more appropriate. This may present challenges if the policy changes you are advocating are quite technical: supporters may need to be walked through how changing this or that regulation will translate into a real-world improvement in their situation (which can itself be a useful check for assuring yourself that it definitely will!).

There is also the question of what your supporters want to know about policy. Do they primarily want to hear what the organisation is doing (and therefore also on the campaigning front), or are they keen to get an ongoing news update about the latest developments, which might also then encompass other aspects of the organisation’s work? This may already be part of the information or advice offer your organisation makes to members, for instance providing updates on regulatory change: in this situation, you will need to figure out how you work with your information / advice colleagues, who may have their own specialist expertise (which might be in providing healthcare information, or in particular areas of law or accountancy, for example).

So you might find yourself having to work out whether existing channels provide you with a good route for getting the information out to supporters, or if you need to create something new. My instinct is always to be cautious about creating beasts to feed: a monthly policy and/or campaigns newsletter might sound great, but it will be an ongoing sink of resource that you may or may not be able to spare.

Conclusions

One perhaps obvious question to consider about your supporter has gone unspoken so far: what are they like? The character of your supporters may have a big bearing on the work you are able, or feel able, to do with them. Are they angry, either about the policy issues you’re working on or just generally? Are they mostly in poor health, or even terminally ill if that’s the nature of the disease your organisation works on? Are they well placed to support your work? Do they have confidence in the organisation? When being interviewed for jobs, the character of the relationship between an organisation and its membership is something I’ve often asked about.

Whatever their character, your organisation’s supporters matter. The relationship you have with them, whether it’s a strong and heavily involved one, or light touch and irregular, will have big implications for how you go about both policy work and the campaigning that will flow from it. You will need to consider both their role in your work, and how you meet their needs.